Distraction is something the modern world is immersed in. People are glued to their devices day in and day out. We could ask, has the privileged modern life become so easy that we’ve just entrenched ourselves into distraction? I can’t really speak for previous generations before I was born, but reading accounts in history, it doesn’t seem like they had much time for distraction during daylight hours at least, life was a heavy toil for most who lived since society moved into farming communities and larger communes. Of course entertainment, competition, games have been around as long as human society has, but it seems we’re at a stage where distraction is maximized more and more in our lives, it’s so accessible now with the modern mobile phone.
Aside from distraction, what else is there though? Productivity, socialising and relaxation. In a way distraction can be a part of all these things. It depends on the form of distraction you choose and the reason. What are you distracting yourself from and why?
When you’re chronically ill, you’re usually trying to distract yourself from pain, fatigue and low mood. Distraction can be very good at letting you escape from these problems. Whilst trying not to sound too obtuse, the problem within the problem is that if you constantly distract yourself you aren’t solving the problem that you’re distracting yourself from…..I’m sure it’s a reality everyone can relate to; putting off your worries with distractions, and never really solving the worry.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t enjoy distractions, just that we shouldn’t seek them out all the time, being bored for a short time can be positive. Our life can be split into our conscious inner focus, our conscious outer focus and when we sleep (our subconscious focus). Again you could argue that distractions can be a part of all three, and these three foci can even overlap. You could say distractions are the rest we take from the problems within our current focus. It lets us focus on something other than our problems.
If all you do is focus on your problems, not only do you tire out quickly, but you can become inefficient, unhappy and stuck. But on the other side if all you do is distract yourself, you can find yourself unhappy, stuck, bored and unsatisfied. Devoting time to our problems is a key requirement to life satisfaction, and it needs to be balanced out with distraction, not dominated by it.
One issue with distraction when you’re ill, is that it often takes up our time that we should put towards true relaxation, especially because true relaxation is incredibly hard to achieve when you deal with intrusive pain and fatigue. Normally speaking, you should be more relaxed when distracted from your problems. The problem occurs when you’re ill and entering into distracting drains your mental energy instead of boosting it.
You might have difficulty focusing, following or enjoying something, yet you still try to distract yourself, scrolling through social media or bingeing TV shows. Pure relaxation is an illusive term, but it’s something you probably need even in tiny doses. You could say it’s basically meditation or mindfulness with or without spirituality added to it.
Try doing absolutely nothing but sitting or lying down, breathing and being bored. Don’t attach to your thoughts, instead let them go. Don’t even have any serious goal in this situation, it sounds paradoxical but you don’t even want to have the goal of relaxation because even that is a burden. Let awareness come to you and let go of it, don’t try to take hold of it. Just let everything go that you’re holding. If anything else you’ve ignored comes to you, don’t react to it or hold onto it.
When you do this properly, you only need 5-10 minutes. You don’t need a 30 minute mindfulness session. You don’t have to add yoga or movement to it, but you can if you feel like it. Lying down with a weighted blanked, earplugs, eye mask, curtains closed, in comfortable clothing is a great start. The gold standard would be float therapy in a sensory deprivation tank, but not everyone can afford or access that.
I sometimes dislike the terms mindfulness or meditation. It assumes a goal. Goals are burdensome. But this is hypocritical because we want to relax, and relaxing is our goal. I think that’s why many people struggle with mindfulness and mediation, they try too hard, they are “trying” to relax. It’s like trying to fall asleep when you aren’t tired, it’s just extremely difficult. Does anyone really remember how they fell asleep? You can’t pin down your thoughts or what happened because you drifted off, you slowly lost consciousness, and that process happens to you, it’s not something you do as an purposeful act, it’s both a need and a habit. Conscious relaxation should be the same, the true goal is to cultivate a state of mind that basically causes you to space out.
In truth, this all sounds extremely similar to mindfulness or meditation. It uses the same words and same sounding method, you’ve likely read it before. But the difference here is, awareness. In those practices, you are sharpening your awareness, in this practice, you aren’t. I would say you’re sheathing your awareness. After all awareness requires energy. This doesn’t mean I don’t also recommend awareness. But awareness is a different tool in my opinion. Awareness is part of self care and I would separate it out from the self care of true relaxation, mainly for chronically ill people. Because you don’t want to be aware of everything, you want your mind to tune down and not sharpen. I guess ultimately you could just say it’s just two type of mindfulness, and I’d probably agree, maybe someone else has already worked out a system and explained it before me, and I’m simply ignorant of it.
The similarities are that both ideas of awareness and true relaxation are to let go of your tension, to let go of your thoughts, and let everything flow. Similar to the Bruce Lee quote of “Be formless, shapeless, like water.”. If I was to really compare the two, one would be to float whilst being aware of what you’re floating on, your body and everything around you, and the other is to float and be aware of nothing, so you can truly relax and recover a little.
The problem with relaxing when you’re chronically ill, is that you’re basically trying to relax whilst floating in a storm, it’s not easy. One aspect that I’m unsure of even myself, is whether this situation warrants painkillers or not.
Painkillers are something that can easily be abused to relax instead of to help you tolerate pain when it’s interfering with life. Once you start taking painkillers to relax, you start to want to take them more than you really need them, because you’re given this tool that can both rid you of pain, and deepen your relaxation. It’s very hard to balance, and everyone’s pain is different. People like me, have random sharp pain that suddenly arrives, and otherwise; pain is at a constant medium level. Others have high level pain at a constant rate. Long term use of painkillers has its negatives, but to me, compared with constant high pain, surely those negatives are lesser. Ultimately it’s something you and your doctor have to come to a decision about. Doctors can’t feel their patients’ pain, and often make judgement calls based on their prejudice, this can unfairly label some people who are suffering deeply, as simply drug seekers, and turn them away. I think at the very least, taking mild painkillers for when you’re attempting 10 minutes of real relaxation, can be more beneficial than not.
Going back to the main topic, I see distraction as a great tool for people suffering, but that it’s probably used too much in our era. It might sound funny, but we simply don’t make time for doing nothing. We seem to want to cram as much as we can into our brains, to get a dopamine hit or to feed our curiosity. Then we wonder why we sleep so badly. By the end of the day, we’re tense, irritated, overtired, lacking awareness and focus. It’s like we’re a tightened coil that’s getting tightened and tightened even more over the day, how can we expect it to suddenly and easily unwind at night. Instead if we just take a little time every now and again during the day to recharge and unwind, we might keep ourselves in a better condition and thus not encounter as much unrestful sleep.
Be formless, shapeless, like water haha